Peter Whittle is founder and director of The New Culture Forum, a think tank that challenges the Left-liberal stranglehold on culture and the arts.

Anti-social behaviour: even cinemas and West End theatres are becoming scary places

When we talk about rising anti-social behaviour, it's often our experiences on public transport and in city centres which come to mind. But it has also infected the culture and leisure industries: cinemas, outdoor events, even theatres now have a low hum of menace.

It's reported today that police in Leeds have charged a 16-year-old boy over a bleach attack on a woman who had asked a group of teenagers to be quiet while watching a film at a cinema. The 46-year-old woman was with her husband and two children at a screening of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

This comes after other reports at the weekend that a number of West End theatres are now employing bouncers to cope with tanked-up audience members who disrupt shows with anti-social behaviour (there was even a case of a man urinating in full view of everybody in the auditorium). It has led to theatregoers being ejected during performances and police being called to some of London’s most successful shows.

Few people now dare to challenge just simple, inconsiderate behaviour in others – behaviour which flies well under the criminality radar but which manages to alienate and intimidate. It’s this which is the most worrying, though understandable, aspect to it all.

There is a section of our society that remains awfully polite about such issues, and prefers to see such non-reaction as part of a British desire not to make a fuss or cause embarrassment. It's a nice, quaint idea but it no longer plays: they simply don’t get the fact that now, it’s all about fear.

And alongside this fear is the sense that the order of things has become so inverted that one will be on shaky ground if one does indeed speak up. Most people now register some degree of outrage at being asked to desist, no matter how politely you do it. You are the rude troublemaker in their eyes. For some kind of order to be restored, back-up is crucial. And formal authority has more or less left the scene. You are on your own.

Is there anyone who, if they are completely honest, would dare ask a couple of young men to turn down the booming thuds of music that emanate from their car as it waits alongside theirs at the traffic lights? I have been in this situation a number of times over the past month, my car vibrating with close-range noise pollution, but have to confess that I too have kept quiet. And I’ve had political sanction: Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, said last year that the best approach if one came across certain sorts of antisocial behaviour was not to get involved.

It's no wonder that the public sphere is becoming an increasingly ghostly place.